“A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.”

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.

I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains – or spiritual trial? Once they’re over, the world looks quite a different place again.

While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.

Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes.

The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

Not hero worship, but intimacy with Christ.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.

God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth.

In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.

Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.

The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind.

The task of pastoral ministry, above all else, is to arrange contingencies for an encounter with the divine.

No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy.